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Keep Your Tenants Informed

Everything in our life needs some sort of maintenance to keep it shiny and in working order. The same thing applies to the Internet and Service Providers. From time to time, as a Service Provider, you must carry out some sort of maintenance to keep your offering up and running,

The other side of this requirement is to keep your clients and customers informed of your maintenance schedule before you start. You also have to keep them up to date on progress, if it is going to take a while.

As a Service Provider who uses Veeam Cloud Connect to offer Backup and Disaster Recovery As a Service (BaaS & DRaaS), your communication with your customer is simple. During the maintenance period, you can configure Veeam Cloud Connect to switch to maintenance mode; you do this by choosing the Maintenance mode option as illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Maintenance mode

How it works

When you, the Service Provider, wish to schedule a maintenance interval, you manually switch the Veeam Cloud Connect to Maintenance mode. The other option is to use Powershell to achieve the same end. You can add a level of automation here too; for example, using the following Powershell command “Enable-VBRCloudMainetenanceMode” with windows scheduler, you can automatically schedule the maintenance to occur at a specific time without manually going through the steps on the Veeam console.

Now, any tenant who attempts to communicate with the Veeam Cloud Connect server while it is in Maintenance mode will receive a message saying the Veeam offering is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. See Figure 2 for an example of the message.

Figure 2 – Maintenance message

Customize your Maintenance Mode Message

The maintenance message shown at Figure 2 is the default message included with the Veeam product. However, as the Service Provider, you might wish to customise this message to be more specific to your offering. To customise the default maintenance message, you have only to add a registry key. In the registry key, you write the specific text you want to appear in front of your customers. See Figure 3 for an example maintenance message registry key.

Figure 3 – Maintenance message registry key

The key at Figure 3 is wrapped into a .reg file to make it easier to insert into the MS Windows Cloud Connect server registry.

The CloudMaintenanceModeMessage registry key must be created as a <string> key. As is normally required with MS Windows, the server must be rebooted for the registry key change to take effect.

Tip: Instead of rebooting the server, you can also restart the Windows Explorer service for the update to take effect.

Things to Know about the Veeam Maintenance Mode

These items listed below are things you should know about Veeam Maintenance Mode:

Gracefully stop currently running tenant jobs targeted at a cloud repository of the SP:

Backup copy jobs for Veeam Agent backups created in the Veeam backup repository; and

Veeam Agent backup jobs.

Prevent tenant jobs from starting.

Notify tenants about maintenance in the cloud infrastructure.

In Veeam Backup and Replication, a tenant can successfully perform the following tasks targeted at the SP cloud resources at the same time the SP backup server is operating in the Maintenance mode:

Run a VMware vCloud Director backup job targeted at a cloud repository provided by the SP;

Run a replication job targeted at a cloud host provided by the SP;

Perform any data restore task with a backup created in a cloud repository provided by the SP (for example, entire VM, VM files, VM disks or file-level restore, and so on); and

Perform any task with a VM replica on a cloud host provided by the SP (for example, partial or full-site failover, failback to production, and so on).

In Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Veeam Agent for Linux, a tenant can successfully restore data from backups in the SP cloud repository at the same time the SP backup server is operating in the Maintenance mode.

Conclusion

Communication with your tenants is very important. By keeping your tenant informed of your scheduled maintenance of the Veeam Cloud Connect infrastructure, and other related infrastructure, you will reduce the frustration of your tenants while your offering is not available. Informing your tenants that the server is undergoing maintenance is far better than having them assume your offering has failed. Incorrect assumptions can hurt your business when the customers don’t know what is going on.

Do something right, and they might tell two people; do something wrong, and they will tell everybody.

On this blog, we discussed how to enable Veeam Cloud Connect Maintenance Mode manually, showed you the Powershell maintenance mode command, and how to customise the Maintenance Mode message.